Somapura Mahavihara
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Tibetan sources count Somapura among the five great monastic universities of Pala-era eastern India, and by area it was the largest of them.
- Atiลa's own teacher, Ratnฤkaraลฤnti, served as an elder of the monastery, and several other renowned scholars lived and worked within its walls.
- In the eleventh century an invading army of the Varman king Jatavarman set fire to part of the monastery.
- Tibetan historian Taranatha records that the monastery was repaired during the reign of the Pala king Mahipala around the turn of the eleventh century.
- A stone pillar at the site bears an inscription naming the monk Ajayagarbha and dated to the fifth regnal year of the Pala king Mahendrapala.
- The mound was noted by the surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in the early nineteenth century, and Alexander Cunningham explored it in 1879โ80.
- Systematic excavations ran from 1923 to 1934, led for most seasons by archaeologist K. N. Dikshit, whose 1938 report is still the key record of the site.
- Scholars have proposed very different lost summits for the central temple, from a stupa to a tall spire to a crown like the Ananda Temple at Pagan in Myanmar.
- Finds kept in the site museum include a bronze bust of the Buddha and copper and silver coins spanning the eighth to sixteenth centuries.
Why it is worth it
Somapura Mahavihara, at Paharpur in northwestern Bangladesh, is the ruin of one of the largest Buddhist monasteries ever built south of the Himalayas. Seals found during excavation name it as a foundation of the Pala king Dharmapala, who ruled Bengal around the late eighth and early ninth centuries, though Tibetan sources credit his successor Devapala. For some four hundred years it was one of the great monastic universities of eastern India, part of a network that included Nalanda and Vikramashila, and scholars travelled here from as far as Tibet. The teacher Atiลa, who carried Buddhism to Tibet in the eleventh century, is associated with it.
The plan is immense and severely regular. A square enclosure about 281 metres on each side is lined on all four sides by 177 small cells in which the monks lived and meditated, facing inward onto a vast open courtyard. At the centre rises the ruin of a cruciform temple built in three receding terraces, still around 21 metres high, whose original summit is lost and remains a subject of scholarly debate. This combination of a cross-shaped base, stepped terraces and inset chambers is thought to have influenced Buddhist architecture far to the east, and scholars have compared it with temples in Myanmar and with the Loro Jonggrang and Sewu temples at Prambanan in Java.
The temple walls carry one of the site's great pleasures: long rows of terracotta plaques, many still in place, with figures and motifs, they reflect the Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions that met here. Stone sculptures, inscriptions and coins have also come to light, and a copper plate dated to 479 records a donation to a Jain teacher on the neighbouring land, evidence that the site was sacred before the monastery. The monastery declined during the twelfth century, was abandoned and gradually vanished beneath a mound, which gave the village its name: Paharpur means hill town.
Today the site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1985, and one of the most important archaeological sites in Bangladesh. A site museum near the ruins displays finds from the excavations. The scale is best appreciated by walking the full circuit of the enclosure, with the brick mass of the temple rising from the open courtyard.
Getting there
Paharpur lies in Badalgachhi Upazila, Naogaon District, about 9 km from Joypurhat; buses and auto-rickshaws run from Joypurhat and from Naogaon, about 32 km away. From Dhaka the trip is roughly 280 km by road, typically six hours or more via Bogura. The nearest airport is Shah Makhdum in Rajshahi (RJH), about 75 km away, with domestic flights from Dhaka.
On these lists
25.03111, 88.97694per Wikidata